Virgin Galactic's Unveil Is Tip of the Iceberg for Private Spaceflight

In the Mojave desert on Monday, strong winds and cold weather swept through Virgin Galactic's unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, an event that brought together the eager, capable and readying private space industry. Attendees heard grand talk of a new day of spaceflight arriving, but how significant, really, was Monday's event? Space analyst Rand Simberg reports from on the scene.

A rainbow appears on the road ahead just 10 miles south of Mojave. (Photogaph by Dale Amon. All rights reserved.)

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Just as King Canute couldn't hold back the incoming tide, Monday's vaunted roll-out of Virgin Galactic's and Burt Rutan's new spaceship in Mojave, Cali., demonstrated the limits to the power of even the most charismatic, visionary billionaire. Virgin's Richard Branson famously likes to throw extravagant parties, and so he did for the occasion, but Mojave's weather refused to cooperate.

It had been dry in southern California for weeks, but the chosen date for the event managed to coincide with the first winter storm of the season. The rain and snow came through the high desert the previous night, with forecasts of more. Hopes were raised on a rainy drive up from Los Angeles by a rainbow as the rain quit, at least momentarily, that perhaps Branson's luck had held out.

Alas, it was not to be. By the end of the day, the rain returned and the steady wind had increased to hurricane strength, to the point at which everyone had to be evacuated. But before the weather spoiled all, Virgin set up for a decadent affair. Tents stood to house several hundred VIPs--"Future Astronauts," (people who have put down deposits for flights to space) employees of Scaled and Virgin Galactic and the media--and they were filled with an astronaut ice sculpture, food and a full bar, literally made of ice.

There was a press conference that started at four. It was primarily an hour of talks by Branson and Rutan and other dignitaries, including California and New Mexico governors Schwarzenegger and Richardson. To listen to the speeches, one would think that the first captive carry flight (in which the vehicles are flown mated, but the upper stage is not released, just to learn how well they fly together) was only days away, but off the podium, Burt Rutan was more realistic.

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"This is a research project, so we don't have timetables," Rutan says. "I can't tell you how far off we are, but it's not complete yet. She wasn't even painted three days ago and she won't be flying in the next few weeks, that's for sure." As one reporter noted, though, he does expect to fly the vehicle in 2010.

A subscale model of the new SpaceShipTwo in the tent is contrasted against a full-scale model of its SpaceShipOne predecessor outside in the wind and cold. (Photograph by Rand Simberg. All rights reserved.)

Following the speeches, a question came from the audience: How many people would be flying into space in 2020? Branson gave an interesting answer; even though he believes Virgin is about five years ahead of the pack, he hopes to have competition.

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That's a good expectation for him, because despite all of the Virgin-focused hoopla, there is a lot more going on in Mojave these days than just Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. And even for those two companies, there is more to space going on in Mojave than suborbital tourism.

For one, there is recognition by NASA that these new suborbital vehicles could be useful for doing hands-on weightless research, and a Request For Information came out recently for the industry to tell NASA of its capabilities in meeting such needs. Prior to the advent of suborbital vehicles, the only access to minutes of weightlessness was aboard sounding rockets, which are costly, take weeks or months to integrate a payload into, and cannot be accompanied by an experimenter. As former NASA official Alan Stern (who attended the event) has noted recently, the ability to fly experimenters and their experiments into suborbit, regularly and cheaply, could be a game changer in terms of research progress.

Virgin probably won't be the only Mojave company responding to that request for information. XCOR Aerospace, located next door to one of Scaled's hangars, continues to develop its own suborbital tourist vehicle, the Lynx. While it won't initially get all the way to the 62-mile altitude considered to be the threshold of space, it will still allow long weightless periods for its passenger and a smaller experiment, with the opportunity to go higher and longer with follow-on versions.

Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks down the road, Masten Space Systems, fresh off its recent surprise win over Texas' Armadillo Aerospace in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge, plans to start flying to altitudes far beyond the meager few hundred feet needed to win that prize. According to business development manager Michael Mealling, "about half of next year's flights will be in the 1500- to 10,000-foot range. Toward the end of the year we'll be breaking through the 100,000-foot [about 20 miles, or about a third of the altitude needed for official spaceflight] barrier."

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Getting higher than that is somewhat of a technical challenge, in terms of scaling up engines and tanks, building aeroshells that can take the entry velocities and developing reaction control systems for operations out of the atmosphere. But given its surprising progress to date and its come-from-behind victory only a couple months ago, the company seems to have the team to meet it. The main thing that it will need is the most vital rocket fuel of all--money.

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Masten's Xoie flies against a backdrop of Mojave's windmills to the west. (Photograph courtesy of Mike Massee and Masten Space Systems)

XCOR's CEO, Jeff Greason, agrees. I asked him if Lynx will be flying next year, at the company's hangar, where they were providing hospitality in the form of sandwiches for out-of-town visitors like myself.

"Probably not, but I think we have a good shot at flying in early 2011," Greason says. "We are currently funding constrained," he says. That is, with more money, XCOR could have been flying sooner, and are not having any technical issues with the design--at least none that are holding back its schedule.

"Things are starting to turn around, and I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to get the funds that we need in the next few months," he says. "Most of the investment in this industry to date has been from people investing their own money, but in the past year we've started to see a few investments by traditional venture investors--people investing other peoples' money," Greason says. "There are signs that this will continue next year, and we expect to get some of it."

Branson has found other people's money, most recently from Abu Dhabi, which pledged to invest almost $300 million in Virgin Galactic. It's unlikely that this is only with the intent of suborbital tourism. The carrier ship is capable of acting as a first stage to launch a small orbital rocket, which could dramatically decrease costs of launching small payloads, and improve responsiveness and potentially replace satellites quickly. Also, a vehicle capable of air launching can provide flexibility of launch azimuth and inclination unavailable to one that must leave from a fixed launch site.

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This competition is not just a business competition. It's a competition between technical concepts. Virgin is air launched with an air-breathing first stage. XCOR's Lynx is a pure rocket plane, from runway takeoff to runway landing. Masten's vehicles will be vertical takeoff and vertical landing, with no wings, and the air will be nothing to them but an impediment. And other companies have other approaches, some of which are variations on these, with different propulsion systems and other aspects.

Which is best? Who knows? That's an argument that has been raging on for decades, and with the traditional NASA approach, many millions would have to be spent to decide in studies, and then a single one picked and flown; an approach that has pretty much uniformly failed. But in the new world of commercial spaceflight, in Mojave and elsewhere, the market will finally decide. And there may be room for all of them, at various levels of activity.

So, despite the presence of the glitterati and signed-up tourists, such as Victoria Principal, Monday's event was about a lot more than suborbital tourism, and a lot more than suborbital activities in general in Mojave. It was the highly publicized tip of an iceberg of potential near-term space activity, with vehicles already flying and plans for more.

A view from the rear of the vehicle reveals what's different about the middle pod--a rocket engine. (Photograph by Dale Amon. All rights reserved.)

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